Do Love

Introduction

“Love never fails,” so the Bible tells us. This is true of God’s love, but not of ours. Our experiences of love, whether given or received, are marred with failures and short-comings. We crave what we cannot seem to give or get. Somewhere in our internal world, love gets tangled and distorted with our mixed motives, changing feelings, wavering intentions, and misinterpreted actions. Love may not fail, but we have failed at love.
You would think that for something so common to human experience and so universally desirable, we would have a crystal clear understanding of the meaning and expression of love. But people are notoriously vague and clueless about it. Love’s meaning is elusive . . . as is its reality in our everyday lives. I have loved enough to know that I do not love well. My goal is not for you to love like me, rather to point towards the greatest lover of people the world has ever known—Jesus Christ.
This book is not a book on marriage or romantic love. It’s not specifically about family dynamics or solely about justice and benevolence. It relates directly to all, but is intentionally designed for broader applications. Love is to be done in all our relationships, not only with a narrowband of people we call family or to a specific church or friendship clique. Love is what we do in all of our relationships. It is to be our comprehensive way of life because we follow Christ. We need an understanding of love that is applicable to all human relationships—a baseline definition and a way of acting that works in real life conditions.
Even as Christians, we give lip-service and airtime to love, but we haven’t given it much biblical study, serious thought, or world-changing application. We’ve been so immersed in a culture that equates love with feelings and matters of God with subjectivity that we hardly know if we ever really love God and others at all. We need to discover what love is, where it comes from, and how to actually do it. Until we ourselves are transformed by God’s love into people who do love, we will never fulfill the Great Commandment to love God and others.
Love’s greatest expression is found in the oft-quoted John 3:16, “For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son.” God is love, so God gives us an expression of His love. His best and clearest expression of love is His Son, Jesus Christ. Love is given or bestowed upon the beloved. Love’s nature is to give, not take. And giving, however expressed, is always an action. It’s tangible and real. Sentimental or romantic love has meaning only as it is expressed, whether verbally or by action. Thoughtful words or a love song become love when shared or sung. Being deeply moved with compassion for the poor, hungry, and vulnerable is good only if it includes being moved to action. Justice and compassion need action to become a force for change in society.
When we put the incarnation of God in Christ together with the nature of love expressed tangibly through words and actions, we arrive at incarnational love. It is this love that we are commanded to do. With our very real and hectic human lives in this chaotic real world we are commissioned to love through the giving of our lives away by actions and words that will benefit and bless others.
In this book I have included short chapter breaks called “Confessions of a Love Hack.” This began as a fun and light-hearted way to point out my own ineptitudes as a loving person. As more of these experiences emerged from my memories, I became aware of how much of a love hack I really am. These stories will hopefully help you understand those moments in your own life where love comes up short. Until we come to terms with our inability to love others as Christ loves them, His love simply won’t be fully matured in us. It is the awareness of our unlove that helps us look to Jesus for inspiration and empowerment.
Be aware that I often use the word unlove. This is intentional and is understood more broadly than hate. Hate is but one piece of the unlove pie. When John tells us that “whoever does not love abides in death,” he deliberately steers clear of the word hate. Unlove includes all attitudes, words, and actions that are not loving. For love to be Christ-like love, it must go beyond merely doing no harm. Love must actively and deliberately do good.
Love is too vast a subject to be exhausted in a single volume . . . or even in a library of books. This book will have gaps in it. Some of these are known and intentional; others are unknown and unintentional. I do not claim to have plumbed the depths of every aspect of love, only to have thought long and hard about it in light of Christ, the Bible, and my failures. I am merely one voice among thousands who have uttered words on a topic that we can only know in part. I long for the day when we will know love fully (1 Corinthians 13:8-13).
I openly confess that I am a love hack and do not claim to have attained a life characterized by love. I have experimented with loving others, and have even started to intentionally work it into my life rhythm. The terrifying thing about writing a book on the inexhaustible subject of love is that I will inevitably disappoint others who look to my insights and example. I know that my head and my heart have a gaping love hole in them. If you want perfection in love, you must look beyond me to Jesus.
The foundation for this book is simply this: If love is to be love at all, it must be Christ-like. The very epitome of Christ’s love is its incarnational nature. He did not merely teach on love, He embodied it. Real love is expressed through a human life in this reality called planet earth. Love is as tangible as Christ’s physical body, spoken words, and visible actions. Anything else is just love theory.
“By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers” (1 John 3:16).